Ervil LeBaron was a murderous white supremacist and religious fundamentalist, nine of whose followers were slaughtered in a 2019 cartel killing.
Lewis Beale
The Daily Beast
July 3, 022
He’s been called the “Mormon Manson,” but polygamist Ervil LeBaron and his Mexican-based family managed to make Charlie and his gang look almost tame by comparison. A 6’8” white supremacist and religious fundamentalist who loved to seduce underage girls, LeBaron trained women to kill for him and ordered hits on rival polygamists and “apostates” from his church. And kill they did: Members of LeBaron’s family were responsible for as many as 50 murders, as well as bank robbery, car theft, drug dealing, and selling guns to drug traffickers.
Ervil was eventually arrested for his crimes and extradited to the U.S., where he died in prison in 1981. But his wives, children, and spiritual followers continued their murderous rampage well into the ’90s. As one LeBaron family member put it, “Everyone is an infidel if they don’t believe what you believe.”
Outwardly, however, the LeBarons appeared to be just a wealthy farming clan with bizarre sexual practices who had made an “I won’t bother you if you don’t bother me” pact with El Chapo and the notorious Sinaloa cartel, which had drug smuggling routes near the Mormon colony. But, says Sally Denton, author of The Colony: Faith and Blood In A Promised Land, “I think it’s naive for the public to believe they were just friendly neighbors, saying hello at sicario checkpoints. I don’t believe you don’t live with some of the most violent people in the world without having accommodations. I think they were helping with guns.”
All this fell apart when El Chapo was extradited to the U.S. and sentenced to life in prison, after which rival groups began fighting over the Sinaloa drug empire, which put Mormon lives in danger. And on November 12, 2019, the worst that could happen did happen: on a 12-mile stretch of barren road, a favored drug cartel route that happened to link two Mormon enclaves, as many as 100 sicarios descended on a convoy of three cars containing Mormon mothers and their children and murdered nine people, some of whom were burned alive.
Some said the victims were deliberately targeted, to start a war between the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels; others said it was a case of mistaken identity; and still others said it was an offshoot of a fight for water rights between the Mormons and their Mexican neighbors. Denton begs to differ.
“I think somebody owed somebody something,” she says. “I think there was a great big message, not to the women and children, but to their husbands and fathers. It was not a case of mistaken identity; they were targeted. It was about money; somebody reneged on some kind of deal.”
But The Colony is about a lot more than a perverse, corrupt, and violent Mormon family and its relationship with drug cartels. It is, in fact, a mesmerizing deep dive into Mormon fanaticism, violence, deceit, mental illness, and misogyny, dating back to the religion’s mid-19th century founding by Joseph Smith. It follows Smith’s acolytes after his 1844 murder by a mob in Carthage, Ill. to their eventual landing place in Utah. There Brigham Young began what he called a “Mormon reformation,” which involved “cleansing the wayward Saints through blood atonement,” and ended up in the most infamous episode in Mormon history, the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which a wagon train of 140 men, women, and children passing through Mormon territory were murdered, the slaughter blamed on Paiute Indians. It’s a stain the Church has never been able to wipe out.
“The Church has never accurately acknowledged its role in the massacre,” says Denton. “A lot of people were involved, and the evidence shows it went up to Brigham Young. They blame it on the Paiutes, or on renegades in Southern Utah. It has to have discredited the Church.”
The massacre and Brigham Young’s role in it shine a light on what looks like mental illness in not just Smith and Young but in the LeBaron family. “There are references to a strain of insanity in the LeBaron family, and in the leaders of the Mormon Church historically,” says Denton. “I think it’s the fact the entire Church is based on this communion with God that any man can do, and sets it up with any delusional aspects. You have to look at the visions of Smith and Young, down to the LeBarons, and question what’s the impulse here. I think with the LeBarons, a lot can be explained by incest.”
“The LeBarons established Colonia LeBaron in 1944. It soon became a center of sexual deviancy, something that also has been a part of Mormon history since its beginnings.”
And then there’s polygamy. The practice was part of the Church since its inception, but when the Mormon leadership realized Utah would never become a state because of its existence, polygamy was outlawed in 1890. That forced recalcitrant fundamentalists south to Mexico, where then-President Porfirio Diaz encouraged them to settle in the northern states of Sonora and Chihuahua, which soon became a hotbed of religious fanaticism (Mexico now has the largest Mormon population outside the U.S., the vast majority not polygamists). During the Mexican Revolution, Pancho Villa forced them to move back to the States, and most never returned. But the LeBarons did, and established Colonia LeBaron in 1944. It soon became a center of sexual deviancy, something that also has been a part of Mormon history since its beginnings.
“When Joseph Smith first introduced [polygamy] it was not without some sexual deviancy,” says Denton, who is herself a descendant of Mormon pioneers and polygamists. “I interviewed wives and daughters who were raised in polygamy, and one of them said they were converted below the belt. It promotes sexual deviancy, a lot of suppression and repression, even in people who don’t have that proclivity. The true believers believe they are creating the kingdom of God on Earth, and the goal is to spread the seed of man, and for the women, it’s to have as many children as possible, and in the LeBaron colony, they began having babies as early as 13 years old.”
“There are parallels between the LeBaron family and the Mormons in Mexico that are relevant to the impulses of white nationalism.”
— Sally Denton
Denton’s book is being released at just the right time. Interest in Mormon crime and perversion seems to be hitting some sort of all-time high, thanks to two recent documentaries, a true crime series, and a podcast: Murder Among the Mormons, a Netflix series about a man who forged documents related to the Latter-day Saint movement; Under the Banner of Heaven, an FX on Hulu series about the investigation of the murders of a Mormon mother and daughter, that involves a fundamentalist branch of the church; Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, a Netflix documentary about fundamentalist pedophile leader Warren Jeffs; and Deliver Us From Ervil, an Apple podcast about the LeBaron family.
“I believe all stories that are deep and legitimate find their level,” says Denton of this Mormon wave. “There are parallels between the LeBaron family and the Mormons in Mexico that are relevant to the impulses of white nationalism and events going on in the U.S. A lot of the same impulses of clannishness, nativism, and white Christian nationalism are the underbelly of all three of these stories.”
But it is the LeBaron massacre victims who are at the heart of The Colony, and the polygamist wives who have to deal with the misogyny of their husbands. Only a handful of people have been arrested for the murders, and to this day, no one really knows who ordered the hit, or why. Denton sees this as a case of how women are expendable in the LeBaron community, that these young mothers and their children should never have been allowed to drive along this dangerous road without their husbands, unarmed.
“In the end I came back to the real victims of this story, the women and children—the ones who always seem to be expendable in these stories,” she says. “I sought to dig deeper into their murders and their relationship to a long and often sordid history of polygamy. I hoped to show not only the forces at work behind the scenes—some of them quite dark—but also to use my own family’s history with the early [Latter-Day Saints] faith to put it all in context.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ervil-lebaron-the-mormon-manson-and-his-familys-mexican-massacre
Mark Silk
Religion News Service
January 7, 2016
The militia that has occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters represents a strain of right-wing Mormonism that took shape after World War II.
That was when laissez-faire economics, accompanied by staunch anti-Communism, began to supplant traditional Mormon communitarianism in the Mountain West. The key figures in the shift were Ezra Taft Benson, the former Secretary of Agriculture in the Eisenhower Administration who became president of the LDS Church in 1985; Benson's son Reed, an active member of the John Birch Society; Ernest Wilkinson, president of Brigham Young University; and W. Cleon Skousen, a sometime member of the BYU faculty who worked for the F.B.I. and later served as chief of police in Salt Lake City.
In The Mormon People, Matthew Bowman points out that by the 1970s, Benson's "moralistic libertarianism had gained a vocal following in the church." Concurrently, dispensationalist theology was borrowed from Protestant fundamentalism by Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce McConkie, LDS leaders whose influential theological writings wove elements of premillennialism into traditional Mormon ideas of the End Times — what Mormons refer to as "the last days."
Smith's and McConkie's approach was adopted by Skousen in a series of popular books that made much of the Book of Mormon's sacralization of the American continent and preached a revived view of the United States as guarantor of individual liberty and place where Christ's church would be restored. In such late works as The Majesty of God's Law: It's Coming to America and The Cleansing of America, Skousen went so far as to predict that America would be reborn as a "Zion society" with the entire population organized into Mormon wards, and a restored U.S. Constitution that eliminated political parties and popular voting for the president. In the latter volume, written in 1994 (though published posthumously only in 2010), Skousen envisioned an American Zion purged of wickedness that would serve as a refuge for Mormons from around the world while Planet Earth suffered through an End Times scenario culminating in the Battle of Armageddon.
Among the Malheur occupiers is Lavoy Finicum, a Mormon rancher from Arizona who is the author of Only By Blood and Suffering, a novel about one family's efforts to "survive in the face of devastating end-times chaos." Yesterday, Finicum told reporters yesterday that he'd prefer death over prison. Ammon Bundy, the leader of the Malheur occupation, and his father Cliven, who gained national notoriety for a similar standoff at his Nevada ranch in 2014, likewise belong to the Skousenite wing of contemporary Mormonism.
At a conference at Brigham Young four years ago, LDS Elder Dallin Oaks warned against their ilk.
Another example that I understand to be current among some members in this part of this church is the influence of right-wing groups who mistakenly apply prophecies about the last days to promote efforts to form paramilitary or other organizations. Such groups might undermine the authority of public officials in the event of extraordinary emergencies or even in cases of simple disagreement with government policy. The leaders of the church have always taught that we should observe the law and we should not try to substitute our own organizations for the political and military authorities put in place by Constitutional government and processes.
It's hardly an accident that Salt Lake took little time to condemn the Malheur occupation.
Asked his name by a reporter, a Malheur militiaman identified himself as "Captain Moroni," a military leader in the Book of Mormon whose anti-government stand for liberty has made him a hero on the Mormon right. As my RNS colleague Jana Riess has explained, the Book of Mormon delivers a more mixed verdict on Captain Moroni than some of his devotees make out.
"I still want to be like Captain Moroni," writes one such devotee, "but armed with further knowledge I realize how nuanced and difficult this quest will be as the last days before the second coming of our Lord and Savior unfold themselves before our eyes." I suspect the Malheur militia is about to learn just how nuanced and difficult that is.
http://marksilk.religionnews.com/2016/01/07/the-mormon-messianism-of-the-oregon-occupiers/
Kate Storey
Cosmopolitan
January 8, 2016
Ruth Wariner's dad was her religion's prophet. When she was a teenager, she finally broke free.
When Ruth Wariner walked into her first day of elementary school in Chihuahua, Mexico, she didn't know a soul and couldn't speak the language. She'd grown up nearby in an isolated fundamentalist Mormon colony. She'd never had to learn Spanish.
Wariner's teacher paired her with another student who could translate that day's lesson. The little girl leaned in and whispered to Wariner, "Did you know that we're sisters?" and then pointed to another student. "She's our sister too."
The girls all had the same father: Joel LeBaron, the self-professed prophet who led the polygamist Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times. They were the three youngest of LeBaron's 42 children, born within five months of each other to three of his seven wives, but had never met until that first day of class.
For Wariner, being raised in a polygamist family was a far cry from the lives of the happy-go-lucky characters on HBO's Big Love and the TLC reality show Sister Wives. Her memoir, The Sound of Gravel, which is out this week, paints a heartbreaking picture of the poverty and neglect Wariner faced growing up in the shadow of her prophet father and a stepdad who she alleges sexually abused her.
"It's hard for me to watch anything about polygamy on TV. It's always a very glamorized version," Wariner tells Cosmopolitan.com. "Polygamy is very hard on women and children."
Wariner's mother Kathy was only 17 when she married Joel LeBaron, the leader of her church, a man 25 years her senior.
In 1972, shortly after they wed, Joel was killed in a plot concocted by his brother, Ervil LeBaron, the leader of a different sect who would later be known as "the Mormon Manson" because of the brutal murders he was believed to have ordered. (In 1980, Ervil was convicted of being the "intellectual author" of Joel's death, according to his obituary in the New York Times.) Wariner was only 3 months old when her dad died, but she grew up knowing how important he was to her community.
"I felt special to be the prophet's daughter," says Wariner. "Ever since I can remember, his picture was mounted in the church and it was everywhere we went. Just like Jesus is for Christianity, you start learning from a very early age what that role is for any particular sect, but for us in the fundamentalist Mormon church that I grew up in, it was my father."
She explains her dad's teachings in The Sound of Gravel:
My father believed that polygamy was one of the most important principles God ever gave His people. He preached that for a man to reach the Celestial Kingdom—the highest level of heaven—he had to have at least two wives. If a man lived this principle, he would become a god himself and inherit an earth of his own, one just like our earth. Women who married polygamists, loved their sister wives, and had as many children as they could would become goddesses, which meant they were their husband's heavenly servants.
Her mother remarried two years after Joel's death, becoming the second wife of another polygamist man living in the colony named Lane.
Wariner's grandfather, Alma Dayer LeBaron, was the original prophet who, in 1944, founded Colonia LeBaron, where Wariner grew up. He led his polygamist sect to Mexico, because he'd had visions of the United States becoming engulfed in flames and crumbling, Wariner explains. Because of his terrifying prophecies, LeBaron, which was home to about 1,000 believers when Wariner was young, was a sort of safe place for her and her dozens of siblings, because they believed they'd be shielded from the destruction there.
Wariner and her mom's other children were carted back and forth between Mexico and El Paso, Texas, where they'd collect their mom's welfare checks. Every trip across the border into the States brought waves of anxiety.
"Whenever I went across the border, you never knew what was going to come," she says. "We learned that the destruction was going to come from the States."
But not all their views were so shocking. "LeBaron had more conservative people and more liberal people. There were people who were very strict, stayed home on Sundays, didn't listen to wordly music, dressed in those long dresses, and wore their hair a certain way," Wariner says. "But my mom loved Elvis Presley and the Everly brothers, so she introduced that to us. Her upbringing in California made her naturally less fundamentalist. We wore jeans and T-shirts, but I wasn't allowed to wear bathing suits or shorts. I couldn't show my shoulders."
While we often think of polygamous families living together or in houses side-by-side, Wariner rarely saw her half-siblings or her mom's sister wives. When her stepdad Lane took a third wife, Wariner, her mom and siblings were moved to a series of campers and mobile homes on the outskirts of town. When Wariner and her stepdad were alone, she alleges he would sexually abuse her.
She writes in her book:
My resistance to his kisses had become like a game for him. I'd resist, and then he'd beg me, and then he'd try to kiss me again, and then he'd repeat the cycle until I gave in and kissed him back.
Wariner told her mom, who promised to talk to Lane. But Wariner says the abuse persisted and continued to get worse.
"I think my mom was brainwashed into a religion that taught her she had to be married to see her creator again," Wariner tells Cosmopolitan.com. "She always had it in her heart to live for a higher purpose. I think that polygamy provided it for her."
My mom was brainwashed into a religion that taught her she had to be married to see her creator again.
Nearly every year brought a new baby into Wariner's family. When her mom would give birth, the second-youngest child would be passed off to Wariner to care for. So, at age 14, she dropped out of school to raise her younger siblings full-time.
Wariner assumed she'd follow in her mother's footsteps and enter into a plural marriage, until a conversation with one of her stepsisters made her realize that there were other options. She remembers being 8 or 9 years old when she was playing Barbies with Maria, the daughter of one of Lane's other wives. As they swapped out the doll's outfits, Maria boldly announced that she was going to be a fashion designer one day. "That was the beginning of the revelation that I could maybe do something else with my life too," Wariner says.
A few years later, she began having crushes on boys in her class, which made it even harder to imagine sharing a husband one day.
"It made me feel so uncomfortable — that feeling of jealousy," she says. "It crushed me in a way, especially because I saw how jealousy crushed my mom so many times."
Wariner's mom died tragically in 1988 when she was electrocuted by improperly installed wires in her backyard. Being left alone with her three younger sisters and her stepfather was Wariner's wakeup call.
"After that, once my little sisters were subjected 100 percent to my stepfather, I knew that for their sakes and for mine that I had to get out of there," she says.
She recalls the moment she knew she had to leave in her book:
All the words I'd ever heard in church, and at all the conferences and Sunday-school classes, seemed to be taunting me now: honor thy father, honor thy mother, be like Christ, be good, count your blessings, do what you're told, prophets, men, husbands, gods, visions, dreams, destruction, forgiveness, sacrifice, submission, faith, Babylon, heaven and all the blessed little children... I realized that all those words, words that had held such power throughout my childhood, words that had characterized our way of life, words that had defined me, my siblings, my mom—they meant nothing to me. All the preaching, all the hours in church memorizing scriptures, how could that mean anything when the community supporting it wouldn't defend the innocence and safety of a child?
She called her older brother, who'd moved away from LeBaron years earlier to make money in the States to send back to the family. She explained the abuse she'd suffered since he'd left, and begged him to come pick her and her siblings up.
While her stepfather was on a work trip, doing construction in El Paso, Wariner collected her family's food stamps, Social Security cards, and a few mementos of her mom. At 2 o'clock in the morning, her brother arrived in an old Oldsmobile he'd recently bought, and they all piled in, immediately discussing what they'd need to tell the border police in Arizona — where they'd be sure not to cross paths with her stepdad who'd be driving back from Texas. Their plan to pretend they were just coming back to the States from a shopping jaunt in Mexico worked.
"No one said a word as the car crept into Arizona. Even after the border was a dot in the rearview mirror, the silence continued," she wrote in her book. "I think we were stunned, not to mention overwhelmed by the obstacles that lay ahead."
Once she was free, the effects of her upbringing manifested in ways Wariner couldn't have expected. The family moved in with Wariner's grandparents, who'd left the cult and Colonia LeBaron more than a decade earlier because of the struggle polygamy inflicted on their daughter's life. Wariner got her GED, and eventually went to college and graduate school to get a teaching degree. But throughout her 20s and 30s, she found herself dating wrong guy after wrong guy.
"My mom was someone who lacked a lot of self-love, that's something she didn't know how to have for herself and it's a problem that I've inherited," she says. "I kept being attracted to men who were apathetic. I realized that these men were like my stepfather, not in that they were abusive, but that they were absent emotionally."
Thanks to the health benefits that came with her first teaching job in Oregon, therapy helped Wariner deal with her past. She escaped from LeBaron 29 years ago, and today she's 43 years old and lives with her husband outside of Portland. She says the key to finding her partner was getting to know her husband first as a friend. They met at a fundraising party, where they didn't hit it off romantically at first. But, she says, "as we got to know each other, I adored him, respected him and fell in love with him." Now they have a healthy, equal relationship.
"I call myself a feminist — I consider myself equal to a man, and I don't think I should be submissive to a man," she says. And as far as religion goes, she says, "I'm not Mormon or fundamentalist Mormon now. I feel very spiritual, I still believe in God. I pray and meditate every morning. But I struggle with organized religion because I don't want other people to define what I do with my life."
I call myself a feminist — I consider myself equal to a man, and I don't think I should be submissive to a man.
Wariner has been back to LeBaron three times since her dramatic escape. Her stepfather died, but she still has family living there, who she likes to keep in touch with. While she missed LeBaron and its familiarity for years after she left, she says breaking free changed her life.
"I live a very wonderful, privileged life. I live in a beautiful townhome. I've been married for seven years. I decided not to have kids of my own after the years I spent taking care of my siblings. My siblings live in Seattle and Portland and Southern Oregon. We get to see each other all the time," she says. "I love my life."
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a51783/how-i-escaped-from-a-polygamist-cult/
National PostBrian Hutchinson
August 14, 2014
ANALYSISFor decades, polygamous sect leader Winston Blackmore has exercised power and control over some 500 souls from his stronghold in Bountiful, B.C. He is their chief, their decision-maker. He enjoys many women, having taken some two dozen wives in accordance with what he claims are sacred religious beliefs.
He seems to enjoy notoriety. He once proposed that he and his flock of “fundamentalist Mormon” followers receive star treatment on American reality TV.
But there have been consequences. Mr. Blackmore, 60, recently fought the taxman and lost. A Tax Court of Canada judge agreed last year with an earlier ruling, finding that he’d under-reported his private company’s income by $1.8-million over six years. The judge slapped him with $150,000 in penalties, and she dismissed claims that his community is a “religious communal congregation” and thus tax exempt.
Mr. Blackmore is now being sued by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for alleged trademark violation. The church, which represents mainstream Mormons, wants nothing to do with Mr. Blackmore, Bountiful and its polygamous ways.
